The present invention relates generally to digital switching systems, and more specifically to a switching module for digital cross-connect systems.
In a prior art three-stage nonblocking switching network for digital cross-connect systems, different sizes of switching modules are employed for the different stages of the network. One disadvantage of the prior art is that because of the different switch sizes, three types of switching modules must be provided respectively for the stages. One solution would be to use a basic module having a switch size large enough to accommodate the configuration of any of the stages of the network. However, in some stages of the network the crosspoints are not fully utilized and power is uselessly dissipated by the unused crosspoints.